Today many computer system and software manufactures include multiple language capabilities in the displays of their products in order to market to a multi-lingual customer base. In order to provide this type of functionality, the text shown in the screen displays must be converted to each language for which support is desired. The process of converting text displays to multiple languages can be time consuming, prone to errors, and costly for manufacturers. For instance, text displayed on a computer screen may be represented by a character string source file. Each source file represents a text display and defines the character strings within the text display for each language that may be displayed. In previous methods and systems, the source files for each display of the computer system are sent to a translator for each language enabled for display. Consequently, each source file is sent to many different translators to convert the character strings into different languages. Each translator manually adds the headers or language tags for each string in the numerous files and adds the converted string in place of a source language text. This process requires the manual viewing of many source files to locate the source language version of the character strings and manual conversion of the source language character strings to a new language. The translator copies each source language character string into conversion files. After being copied to conversion files, the source language character strings are converted from the source language version into the specified language for the translator.
After converting the character strings, the process of matching the converted strings of each conversion file with the original source files, from which the source language version of the converted character string originated, commences. In previous methods and systems this is a manual process that is very tedious and prone to errors. After each translator completes conversion of the source language character strings into new languages, the contents of each conversion file must be matched to the original source file from which the corresponding source language character strings originated. The contents of all these files must be manually viewed and, based on the file contents, matched and copied to the various source files. During this complicated process many original strings may be accidentally deleted or modified.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.